This invention relates generally to fiber optic gyroscopes. More particularly, it relates to a scheme for overcoming errors that occur at low angular rates.
At low angular rates, the optics and electronics of an interferometric fiber optic gyroscope may be insensitive to angular motion, resulting in a deadzone. Instead of a linear response to an input angular rate, the transfer curve may exhibit a flat zone until some undefined threshold is exceeded.
It would therefore be highly desirable to produce a gyroscope that exhibits a linear response to any applied angular rate and provides an output of angular rate that can be sampled at random intervals.